I had a bit of a row with Tracey that night because I was in such a foul mood, and the next day we flew back to Ibiza. I didn’t know it then, but it was the last time I’d ever share a studio with the rest of the band, although I rejoined them as summer 2006 approached and we did a few more shows together. These were mainly corporate gigs designed to pay the staggering studio bills.
Despite my unhappiness in London, I still felt we had the makings of a good record. After all, I had written a large amount of the material myself and I had gone to great effort to make a success of things throughout the creative process with Simon. A lot of the basic structure of the unfinished tracks had been my work, so ultimately I wanted it to be a success. What we needed now, however, was someone to help us to filter and refine it. Two A & R guys from Sony came over to London in May 2006 to listen to the material and they gave us their verdict. Do not mix and deliver the record yet, it’s not finished, they advised. It will only be rejected and you know you can do better with the right producer. A & R people don’t always speak in such direct terms, but these guys were very concerned.
However, Nick, Simon, and John were determined to plow on with the mixing. Later that May they flew to New York to hand over the new material to Sony. Roger and I didn’t go. We both felt the album needed more work.
“It just doesn’t sound right, Andy,” Roger told to me on the phone.
I was horrified with the mixes; they were undeliverable. The illusion of progress had taken over the process, and we were back to square one. Later I received a phone call from our management informing me that Sony had rejected the album. I could imagine Donnie Ienner sitting in his big office and listening to the album before saying bluntly, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Surely, everyone would now accept that we needed to call in a producer to oversee the album? It was nothing to be ashamed of. Even the mighty Beatles would not have been the same without the genius of George Martin to guide them. However, I understood that our management were now hinting that Donnie, the president of the label, was the source of the problem!
What a fucked-up situation
, I thought.
I expressed to our management my view that we’d progressed very little since San Francisco, particularly with regard to vocals. I told them in the strongest of terms that I felt it was outrageous that as a band we’d walked into a wall by presenting the album early, against the advice of the A & R team. I said it was a crass state of affairs and that we would never achieve anything collectively until we started to act collectively. It was my way of arguing to our management that we needed help. The way I saw it was that all the greatest records ever made had involved producers. No one is invincible.
Finally, after all this, the others eventually agreed to hire a producer. We were rehearsing for two corporate shows in June when we met with a well-known musical producer called Youth. He had a great track record. He’d just finished doing an album with Primal Scream, and I was intrigued by how he’d handled it. When we sat down with him I asked how they’d worked together and he said they’d done the whole thing in three weeks.
“We got up, we did the track, we did the vocals, we had dinner, and we finished it every day,” he said.
In other words, you
organized
the band and they respected you for it.
I felt he kind of understood what we needed. Everyone in the band was happy to work with Youth. We had a couple of gigs to play over the summer; one was a corporate gig for Deutsche Bank in Barcelona, and the other was a charity concert for the Royal Family in Monaco, after which we planned to begin working with Youth at his studio in Spain in September. I was confident he’d be able to listen to our sound and work out which bits were the most important and how to make all the various components work together as a whole. Sony were also very happy with this arrangement.
Around this time somebody came up with the idea that we could also do some work with the American producer, Timbaland. Although I was happy with Youth, I could see it made sense to look at this, as Timbaland was currently the top dog in the States, and producers can have a very positive effect on a record if their name is hot.
I don’t have a problem with the proposal,
I thought,
as long as he just does one or two tracks with us and the whole thing doesn’t turn into a million-dollar circus
. Later I got a phone call informing me that Timbaland needed to bring his session forward to September for scheduling reasons.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, the show in Monaco was the last time I would ever perform live with Duran Duran.
I was tidying up a few bits and pieces in the garden at home when I received a phone call from someone in our office.
“How do you feel about working with Justin Timberlake?” they asked. I wondered what this added take on the Timbaland sessions was all about. Was this the reason they had been moved to September from October, forever looking for the Big Stunt? I remembered my conversation with Justin at the Brits, but I wasn’t convinced he was the right solution to our problems. He’s an accomplished and very successful artist, but we needed a strong producer, not a show business extravaganza.
“Oh, but Justin is part of Timbaland’s team,” argued a member of our management.
“What fuckin’ team? All we need is a producer,” I said.
“Well, the Black Eyed Peas use a team.”
I couldn’t believe this.
We
are
the team,
I thought.
We just want an Alex Ferguson to coach us.
If, as I feared, marketing reasons were behind it then we were well and truly sunk. Either way, if it was destined to fail it wasn’t for purely musical reasons. I just didn’t get it. Maybe I was just not celebrity-oriented enough anymore?
IT
was around this time that I looked at my passport and discovered that my American visa had expired four months previously. This sort of thing had always been handled by our US management company, so about three weeks before we were due to travel to the States to meet Timbaland I contacted our management in New York. Did I need a visa for this trip, I asked, and if so, were permits for all the band and crew in the process of being sorted out? Yes, it’s all in hand, I was informed. Unfortunately, it turned out that my working visa
was
in hand, but only for the original October dates that we’d arranged with Timbaland (not the new September dates). It made me feel as if our management were now making the most basic of errors. The problem is that with today’s security requirements you just can’t blag your way into the USA like a naive English nanny. You must be legal and documented, and there is no slack allowed if you mess it up.
It was amid all this that life suddenly took an unexpected turn when I received the sort of phone call that every parent dreads.
“Hola, Señor Taylor?” asked the caller.
It was a doctor from the local hospital in Ibiza.
“I have your daughter, Georgie, here.”
Zoom!
A gazillion thoughts raced through my head.
“Is she okay? Why is she there?”
I listened as the doctor told me Georgie had been in a car accident while at the wheel at 5:20 p.m. She was badly shaken and had injured her leg, but fortunately she was sober and okay. She had been a very lucky girl.
Thank God
, I thought.
Georgie had an American passport because she was born in the USA, and the plan had been for her to come to America during the Timbaland trip to keep me company. I rushed down there to discover she’d damaged some ligaments in her leg and in her foot. It meant that she would need to be on crutches during the journey to the States, so I phoned the airline to make special arrangements. When we got to the airport a few days later I remembered that my visa situation still hadn’t been resolved. It had been nagging away at me but because of all the last-minute disruption and panic caused by the accident I’d never got to the bottom of whether or not I could enter the US to work.
“Well I don’t need a visa, Dad, because I’ve got a US passport,” smiled Georgie at the airport.
As it transpired we couldn’t have traveled to America that day anyway. Our flight to Madrid was postponed by three hours, and it meant we would miss our connecting flight to New York. A lot of rubbish was subsequently written about me later, claiming that I’d deliberately walked out on the band by refusing to go to New York, but that was never the case. The
Sunday Times
published a correction to this effect on May 4, 2008, which stated that I was “unable to get a US working visa to attend the New York recording session because of administrative failures by the band’s management.” I used the extra time we had in Ibiza due to the postponement to get onto the Internet and check out the exact situation regarding my visa, with a view to flying out the following day. I went ahead and confirmed the next day’s flights along with wheelchair assistance for Georgie.
I then logged onto the Web site for the US Department of Homeland Security—and it confirmed my fears: it would be illegal for me to enter the States for work purposes without the appropriate visa. In the heated circumstances I was beyond angry with our management for letting the situation slide, and I tried to imagine what would have happened if I’d have arrived in New York without the correct paperwork. There was no way I’d be willing to lie and pretend I was not working. Logically, if any band members or any of their road crew had no work visas, then the sessions in September 2006 should never have been booked, period. In my view, there was just no excuse for not sorting this out and for allowing me to be put in this position.
I knew that after so much friction between me and some of the other members of the band over lyrics and money, they might interpret the fact that I couldn’t travel as a sign that I no longer wanted to be in the band, but I felt I had no choice.
I later fired off the furious e-mail to our management that I copied to Simon, the one in which I said I was “fuckin’
seriously
unhappy.” Unquestionably, everyone should now have been aware of the problem, or had at least been informed.
IN
the days that followed there were several phone conversations between various parties on different sides of the Atlantic. I was still very angry and I could feel the weight of everything that had happened over the last year or so bearing down on me: my father’s death, the constant arguments within the band—it felt as if I’d been trapped on a derailed runaway train. If I had believed I could legally travel to the States, then I would have already been in America, but the way things stood I no longer knew whether or not I wanted to continue in Duran Duran. It’s one thing to deal with your brother’s crap, but way too much of a stretch to accommodate management issues too. Once these start to interfere with the workings of the band it feels like they’re trying to strap on some cheap new turbo to an old classic. If new parts aren’t made with the same quality or class they will eventually fail.
The stress of everything was taking a heavy toll on me, just as it had done in 1985. I could feel that same weird sensation that I’d previously felt of being disconnected from the real world, and I remembered my recent conversation with Roger and John about how we all needed to take more care of ourselves.
Perhaps it was time to see a doctor, I thought. Part of me was thinking,
Don’t be stupid, look at everything you have got. How can you be so down about things?
But life has its own way of unwinding and sometimes you have to adjust to it. So I saw a doctor and explained the way I felt and the context behind my circumstances. He sent me for a series of medical tests, including blood tests to check everything physical in case I had a thyroid problem or something of that order. The results came back clear and I was given a clean bill of physical health, apart from needing a small vitamin boost. Part of the problem was that my father’s death was still taking a heavy toll on me.
“If you cannot control your grieving after a year then things have gone a bit further than they should have done,” the doctor advised me. “The problem is that you haven’t even stopped to think about it, you’ve just tried to carry on as if nothing has happened. You haven’t taken any time to deal with this and it is having an adverse effect on you. Your work is unusual, and although many people suffer from problems at work, yours are of such a unique nature that you need to step back and address this with your business partners.”
If only,
I thought . . .
We had two concerts lined up for the near future, one of which was in Hong Kong. I understood that my lawyer had agreed with our management that I would not need to attend. I wrote a letter to the rest of the band, explaining that I wasn’t feeling too great and that I’d been advised to take some time off, but that I was willing to attend our show in Warsaw. I suggested that I bring the doctor along and that he would be able to explain everything more fully to them, so I was offering to share some very private information with them.
I suspected I’d be able to gauge whether or not they wanted me to continue in Duran Duran by the tone of their response. The e-mail I got back from the rest of the band told me not to bother going to Warsaw and suggested that they come and see me instead. That wasn’t the deal, I thought to myself. The e-mail read as if it had been written by the management rather than the band, and soon afterward my exit from the band became public.
“[Andy] has a virus and his doctor says he would be ill advised to travel,” said a report that was posted on the Internet.
There never was any virus—that information was false—but in the end, in late 2007, I
was
finally diagnosed as having suffered from clinical depression. The doctor suspected the root cause had been a delayed reaction to my father’s death. I didn’t take any medication, but the explanation made perfect sense. The stresses and strains had once again taken their toll.
AFTER
parting from Duran Duran, I was now slowly starting to feel less depressed as I had the time and space to heal, although I can tell you that there were times when only a small part inside of me kept holding on, that tiny inner voice that reverberates to the famous chorus of
“Don’t let the bastards grind you down!”